Month: March 2017

We recently moved our venerable old PartsView online parts catalog to a new, modern programming platform. There were a lot of technical reasons to do this, not the least of which was that the old platform was no longer supported. It was a case of, if we ever wanted to make improvements to it, it first needed a major overhaul.

And so we made the overhaul.

The immediate benefits are that it is faster, more reliable, far easier to maintain and update, and completely mobile friendly. This last bit was very important as we saw that more and more people are using it in the field on their smartphones.

As with any change of this nature there are a few growing pains to deal with:

Bookmarks Need Updating

If you have the old PartsView bookmarked on your browser, you’ll need to delete and recreate that bookmark in order to use the new PartsView. The best way is to either navigate to it from our main website konespares.us, or going directly to our PartsView landing page at partsview.us, and then clicking this button to go into PartsView:

Then, when you’re in the new PartsView system, bookmark that address.

Browser Cache May Need Clearing

Browsers store data about websites you’ve visited to make them load faster when you revisit them. The problem we’re running into is that some of our PartsView users have their browser “cache” (the stored data) filled with information about the old PartsView, which causes problems when trying to view the new PartsView.

We’re going to get into how to do that below, but, make sure when you’re clearing the cache, to only clear the cache — you don’t have to also clear all your stored passwords, etc. (unless you want to).

How you clear your browser cache depends on the browser you’re using. Here’s quick notes for the major four:

Google Chrome

Chrome makes it easy with a keyboard shortcut: in Windows, CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE will take you right to it. On a Mac it’s COMMAND+SHIFT+DELETE

We’re Still Improving Things

When you release an online program such as the updated PartsView there are bound to be some bugs in the system. For a website that seems so simple, it’s surprisingly complex in the background. And while we tried to make it as familiar as, and work the same as, the old one, changing programming platforms forces you to do some things in different ways.

Now that we’re on this new platform and can start adding features, feel free to let us know what you’d like to see added in the comments to this post.